So, why aren't Americans taking to the streets like the Egyptians and Tunisians, demanding revolution? Well, the U.S. is, of course, a much nicer place to live than Egypt, Yemen, etc. according to a host of other important measures - average and median income, infant mortality, poverty rate, civil rights, rule of law, etc.

The graph shows inequality within a country, in the context of inequality around the world. It can take a few minutes to get your bearings with this chart, but trust me, it’s worth it.

Here the population of each country is divided into 20 equally-sized income groups, ranked by their household per-capita income. These are called “ventiles,” as you can see on the horizontal axis, and each “ventile” translates to a cluster of five percentiles.

The household income numbers are all converted into international dollars adjusted for equal purchasing power, since the cost of goods varies from country to country. In other words, the chart adjusts for the cost of living in different countries, so we are looking at consistent living standards worldwide.

Now on the vertical axis, you can see where any given ventile from any country falls when compared to the entire population of the world.

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Notice how the entire line for the United States resides in the top portion of the graph? That’s because the entire country is relatively rich. In fact, America’s bottom ventile is still richer than most of the world: That is, the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than68 percentof the world’s inhabitants.

In such a world, it is easy to see how much of your lifetime income is determined by the accident of where you were born.

A final note: Even though people aren't rioting in the streets over income inequality in the U.S., income inequality in this country is, in my opinion, a huge and growing problem that has been purposefully ignored (or even championed) by U.S. policymakers for the last 30-40 years. More on this in a later post.

About This Blog

I am one of the largely nameless, faceless bureaucrats who work tirelessly (and largely thanklessly) to help ensure that poor people don't go hungry - and a billion other tasks government bureaucrats do that no one notices until something stops working. Living and working in DC is making me angry - and I vent my anger as thoughtfully as I can. Well, OK, maybe I'm not terribly angry ... but I thought it was a good name for a blog. If you're also a bureaucrat, or angry, or thoughtful, I'm happy to entertain guest posts.